Gender Equality in Schools: Implications for the Curriculum, Teaching and Classroom Interaction

This paper discusses the content and delivery of education and how it can reflect and reproduce gender inequalities. Girls’ and boys’ learning and interaction with each other, and the teacher, are influenced by ways of teaching, the content of the curriculum, and relations within the classroom. The paper highlights these aspects of educational provision-curriculum, teaching and learning, and the dynamics of the classroom and school. It further discusses a gender-equitable approach to schooling, making teaching and the curriculum gender equitable in schools and ways of educating teachers to promote gender equality in schools. The paper recommends changes needed to ensure that educational provision will promote gender equality in schools in the new millennium. Keywords: Gender Equality, Curriculum, Classroom interaction

Politics and the Appointment of Council Members, Vice Chancellors and other Principal Officers in Federal and State Universities in the North Central States of Nigeria

The study investigated staff perception of the influence of political factors on the appointment of members of governing councils, vice chancellors and other principal officers in federal and state universities in the north central states of Nigeria. Specially, the study examined the influence of political factors of partisan politics, ethnic and sectional considerations, religious affiliation, favouritism, the quota system and catchment area policy on the appointment of members of governing councils, vice chancellors and other principal officers in federal and state universities. Two research questions and hypotheses respectively guided the study. The review of related literature which was done under the conceptual/theoretical framework identified the influence of political factors on the appointment of members of governing councils, vice chancellors and other principal officers in federal and state universities. The descriptive survey design was used for the study. The population of the study was ten (10) universities made up of five federal and five state universities. The population of the respondents consisted of 11,582 made up of 7,971 staff of federal universities and 3,611 staff of state universities. The proportionate stratified random sampling technique was used to select 1,120 sample respondents made up of 767 staff of federal universities and 353 staff of state universities for the study. A 14-item structured questionnaire titled “Influence of politics on appointment Questionnaire (IPAG) was used to collect data for the study. A reliability estimate of 0.72 was established for the instrument. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while the t-test analysis was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The major findings of the study showed that partisan politics, ethnic and sectional considerations, religious affiliation, favouritism, the quota system and catchment area policy significantly influenced appointment of members of governing councils, vice chancellors and other principal officers in federal and state universities in the North central states of Nigeria. Based on the findings, it was recommended that a congregation committee (CC) and senate search committee (SSC) made up of impeccable characters be established in each university to screen prospective members of governing councils, vice chancellors and other principal officers before their appointment so as to minimize the influence of politics on appointment in federal and state universities in the North Central states of Nigeria. Keywords: Politics, Appointment of Council Members, Influenc

Teachers’ Demands and the Management of Primary School in the North Central States of Nigeria

The paper discusses the concept ‘teachers’ demands’ as the needs of the teachers that is fought for through industrial actions. The paper examines the roles of the teachers in teaching and learning process. The paper highlights the meaning of the concept primary education. The paper contends that if teachers’ demands are not met, there would be problems of laxity and indiscipline in the school and work would be left undone and the set goals of the primary school would be unachievable. The paper concludes that stakeholders in education should rise to speak with one voice to condemn the treacherous act committed against primary education by the governments in the North central states of Nigeria. The paper recommends that a law should be put in place to abolish all private primary schools, which their existence has resulted to the total neglect of public schools. Also, all political office holders should not be allowed to send their wards outside the country to school but be compelled to send their children to government public primary schools. This will re-direct the attention of the government to do what is right and just to the teachers, lift the standard of the public primary school and build confidence in the people. Keywords: Teachers’ Demands, Management, Primary School

5G Internet of Things: A survey

© 2018 The existing 4G networks have been widely used in the Internet of Things (IoT) and is continuously evolving to match the needs of the future Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The 5G networks are expected to massive expand today's IoT that can boost cellular operations, IoT security, and network challenges and driving the Internet future to the edge. The existing IoT solutions are facing a number of challenges such as large number of connection of nodes, security, and new standards. This paper reviews the current research state-of-the-art of 5G IoT, key enabling technologies, and main research trends and challenges in 5G IoT

A survey on 5G networks for the Internet of Things : communication technologies and challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a promising technology which tends to revolutionize and connect the global world via heterogeneous smart devices through seamless connectivity. The current demand for machine-type communications (MTC) has resulted in a variety of communication technologies with diverse service requirements to achieve the modern IoT vision. More recent cellular standards like long-term evolution (LTE) have been introduced for mobile devices but are not well suited for low-power and low data rate devices such as the IoT devices. To address this, there is a number of emerging IoT standards. Fifth generation (5G) mobile network, in particular, aims to address the limitations of previous cellular standards and be a potential key enabler for future IoT. In this paper, the state-of-the-art of the IoT application requirements along with their associated communication technologies are surveyed. In addition, the third generation partnership project cellular-based low-power wide area solutions to support and enable the new service requirements for Massive to Critical IoT use cases are discussed in detail, including extended coverage global system for mobile communications for the Internet of Things, enhanced machine-type communications, and narrowband-Internet of Things. Furthermore, 5G new radio enhancements for new service requirements and enabling technologies for the IoT are introduced. This paper presents a comprehensive review related to emerging and enabling technologies with main focus on 5G mobile networks that is envisaged to support the exponential traf c growth for enabling the IoT. The challenges and open research directions pertinent to the deployment of massive to critical IoT applications are also presented in coming up with an ef cient context-aware congestion control mechanism.In part by the Department of Research and International Support, University of Pretoria, South Africa, and in part by the Meraka Institute, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa.http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6287639am2018Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineerin

Towards Efficient and Scalable Data-Intensive Content Delivery: State-of-the-Art, Issues and Challenges

This chapter presents the authors’ work for the Case Study entitled “Delivering Social Media with Scalability” within the framework of High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet) COST Action 1406. We identify some core research areas and give an outline of the publications we came up within the framework of the aforementioned action. The ease of user content generation within social media platforms, e.g. check-in information, multimedia data, etc., along with the proliferation of Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled, always-connected capture devices lead to data streams of unprecedented amount and a radical change in information sharing. Social data streams raise a variety of practical challenges: derivation of real-time meaningful insights from effectively gathered social information, a paradigm shift for content distribution with the leverage of contextual data associated with user preferences, geographical characteristics and devices in general, etc. In this article we present the methodology we followed, the results of our work and the outline of a comprehensive survey, that depicts the state-of-the-art situation and organizes challenges concerning social media streams and the infrastructure of the data centers supporting the efficient access to data streams in terms of content distribution, data diffusion, data replication, energy efficiency and network infrastructure. The challenges of enabling better provisioning of social media data have been identified and they were based on the context of users accessing these resources. The existing literature has been systematized and the main research points and industrial efforts in the area were identified and analyzed. In our works, in the framework of the Action, we came up with potential solutions addressing the problems of the area and described how these fit in the general ecosystem

An efficient congestion control scheme for a lightweight constrained application protocol in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is a promising technology which tends to revolutionize and connect the global world via heterogeneous smart devices through seamless connectivity. The current demand for machine-type communications has resulted in a variety of communication technologies with diverse service requirements to achieve the modern Internet of Things vision. More recent cellular standards like long-term evolution have been introduced for mobile devices but are not well suited for low-power and low data rate devices such as the Internet of Things devices. To address this, there is a number of emerging Internet of Things standards. Fifth-generation mobile networks, in particular, aim to address the limitations of previous cellular standards and be a potential key enabler for the future Internet of Things. Additionally, the third-generation partnership project has introduced low-power wide-area cellular-based networks such as extended coverage global systems for mobile communications for the Internet of Things, enhanced machine-type communications and narrowband-Internet of Things as enabling solutions to support the new service requirements for massive to critical Internet of Things use cases. Therefore, in a comprehensive literature review, this study highlights the state-of-the-art application requirements of the Internet of Things, along with their associated emerging and enabling communication technologies, with the main focus on fifth-generation mobile networks that are envisaged to support the exponential traffic growth for enabling the Internet of Things. The study further investigates the challenges and open research directions pertinent to the deployment of a massive-critical Internet of Things in coming up with a context-aware congestion control in a Constrained Application Protocol for resource-constrained devices. A profound open research challenge from the literature review is the need for a context-aware congestion control (CACC) approach for a lightweight CoAP/UDP-based Internet of Things traffic. The CACC proposes mechanisms that include retransmission timeout (RTO) estimator, retransmission count based smoothed round-trip-time (RTT) observation, lower-bound RTT restriction approach, and aging concept. The proposed RTO estimators utilise the strong, weak, and failed RTT to identify the exact network status and provide adaptive congestion control. The CACC incorporates a variable of the retransmission count in the request-response interaction model to mitigate the negative variation in RTT due to the fluctuations in the Internet of Things environment. Moreover, with a lower-bound RTO restriction approach, the unnecessary spurious retransmissions are avoided, and the aging mechanism limits the validity of the RTO value to improve the efficiency of the proposed scheme. The proposed CACC model is validated against baseline CoAP and CoCoA+ using Contiki OS and the Cooja simulator. The results obtained are impressive under different network scenarios. Managing congestion control in a resource-constrained lossy network with a high bit error rate is a challenging task that needs to be given due consideration if the ever-growing promises of the Internet of Things are to be actualised. The primary congestion control mechanism defined by the core CoAP specification is not capable of adapting to the bursty traffic conditions. This calls for and motivates the need for further research in congestion control mechanisms. The study proposes a congestion control scheme that utilises a Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO)-based Adaptive Congestion control Technique (PACT). PACT applies random and optimal parameter-driven simulations to optimise the default CoAP parameters in order to adapt to the traffic conditions. The PSO-based algorithm varies the retransmission and max-age values for different traffic scenarios. The proposed PACT exhibits significant performance in terms of packet loss, delay, and normalised overhead in comparison with baseline CoAP with Observe under different network and traffic scenarios.Thesis (PhD (Electronic Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2020.Electrical, Electronic and Computer EngineeringPhD (Electronic Engineering)Unrestricte

Impact of Infrastructure Facilities on Academic Staff Job Performance in Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria

The research paper is a comprehensive review that examines the influence of infrastructure facilities on the job performance of academic staff in Nigerian tertiary institutions. The study utilized secondary data obtained from both online publications and print materials. The findings reveal a significant correlation between infrastructure facilities and the job performance of academic staff in Nigeria. Essential facilities such as lecture rooms, electronic libraries, laboratories, lecturer offices, ICT facilities, internet services, electricity, and water play a crucial role in supporting academic staff in fulfilling their responsibilities. In light of these results, the paper advocates for increased government funding for tertiary institutions, emphasizing the importance of such financial support to enable institution managers to adequately provide essential infrastructure

Impact of Infrastructure Facilities on Academic Staff Job Performance in Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria

The research paper is a comprehensive review that examines the influence of infrastructure facilities on the job performance of academic staff in Nigerian tertiary institutions. The study utilized secondary data obtained from both online publications and print materials. The findings reveal a significant correlation between infrastructure facilities and the job performance of academic staff in Nigeria. Essential facilities such as lecture rooms, electronic libraries, laboratories, lecturer offices, ICT facilities, internet services, electricity, and water play a crucial role in supporting academic staff in fulfilling their responsibilities. In light of these results, the paper advocates for increased government funding for tertiary institutions, emphasizing the importance of such financial support to enable institution managers to adequately provide essential infrastructure

An optimization-based congestion control for constrained application protocol

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a lightweight web transfer protocol designed based on the REST architecture standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to meet and accommodate the requirements of the constrained Internet of Things (IoT) environments. Managing congestion control in a resource-constrained lossy network with a high bit error rate is a significantly challenging task that needs to be addressed. The primary congestion control mechanism defined by CoAP specification leverages on basic binary exponential backoff and often fails to utilize the network dynamics to the best of its traffic conditions. As a result, CoCoA has been introduced for better IoT resource utilization. In addition, CoCoA retransmission timeout (RTO) for network dynamics is based on constant coefficient values. The resource-constrained nature of IoT networks poses new design challenges for congestion control mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based congestion control approach called psoCoCoA as a variation of CoCoA. The psoCoCoA applies random and optimal parameter-driven simulation to optimize default CoAP parameters and update the fitness and velocity positions to adapt to the traffic conditions. This process is performed for different traffic scenarios by varying the retransmission and max-age values by using the optimization-based algorithm. We carried out extensive simulations to validate the congestion control performance for CoAP with Observe, CoCoA, and psoCoCoA with different network topologies. The results indicate that psoCoCA outperforms or very similar to CoCoA and achieves better performance compared to CoAP with Observe under different network scenarios.http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nem2022-07-05hj2021Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineerin